Archive for January, 2010|Monthly archive page

The American-led mission in Port-au-Prince,Peter Hallward writes, has put military stability before humanitarian needs in a painful echo of Haiti’s past.

One week after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, it’s now clear that the initial phase of the US-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island’s recent history. Read the rest of this entry »

I just returned from the culte d’action de grace for Haiti at the Centre Kimbanguiste (at Force Publique et Sao, commune de Kasa Vubu) in Kinshasa. It was very moving. First, the crowd was immense, mostly women as is often the case (it was the women who had the courage to go first to Jesus’s tomb). Read the rest of this entry »

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re joined here in New York by the acclaimed actor, director, producer and activist Danny Glover. He’s chairman of the board of TransAfrica Forum and executive producer of a new documentary, Soundtrack for a Revolution, that opens Friday.

To all those who have lost loved ones, please accept our most sincere condolences. Our deepest sympathies to the entire Haitian population and in particular to those who, prior to the earthquake were already suffering too much, simply because they were continuing a struggle started more than two centuries ago. To those who departed, we wish them eternal peace and the most warm welcome by the Creator and the ancestors. Read the rest of this entry »

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.Read the rest of this entry »

The conventional wisdom among Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and (South African Communist Party) SACP strategists, and many other commentators, in business, civil society and opposition parties, is that exploding poverty should naturally strengthen the power of the Left within the African National Congress (ANC) tripartite alliance. Yet the reverse may actually hold true. Read the rest of this entry »